


Flaws

by cecilantro



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-07 01:50:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14660822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilantro/pseuds/cecilantro
Summary: All of your flaws and all of my flaws are laid out one by oneLook at the wonderful mess that we madeWe pick ourselves undoneBastille - Flaws





	Flaws

**Author's Note:**

> Brief mentions of self-harm, otherwise, have fun :3c

It’s the first time in a few days that Caleb gets to sit in the tavern with Mollymauk, they’ve all been so scattered lately, Yasha bouncing between their rooms as she grows more awkward on the floor. Caleb offered her his bed, once, and she’d taken it for all of an hour, she’d told him the next morning, when he found himself waking up in it.   
Drinks are on Molly, he knows how close Caleb is cutting his funds and he’s happy to buy the alcohol and the food.    
He knows it’s been a while since Caleb ate a proper meal.   
Nott’s been sneaking him cob loaves that she’s stolen from around the city, because he refuses to take anything she’s paid for.    
But Molly won’t take no for an answer, and when Caleb tries, Molly just shushes and takes hold of his hand where it waves in mid-air, kisses at bandage-covered knuckles, and that usually works to silence Caleb for a few minutes as he sputters and his brain re-starts.

  
Once he’s eaten, Caleb seems calmer and more amicable. He and Molly laugh together, soft chuckles that build up as they drink more and more.    
“Do you remember Nott asking me about my powers?” Molly asks, leaning idly over his drink, his eyebrows raised to Caleb. The wizard scoffs,   
“Of course I do. You never gave her an answer!”   
“Never got a chance to.” Molly reclines back, the smile turning from bright to somewhat sad, an edge that anyone else might have missed. “Wish I could say it was some heroic fight, something I got nicked in and wished to hit harder and…” He makes an exploding gesture, “But it isn’t. Do you want to know, Caleb?”   
Caleb drums on his glass. He knows that Molly knows he does.   
“If you wish to tell me, I would appreciate the trust,  _ ja _ .” He settles on as response, eventually, and Molly’s sad-edged grin takes on the blur of mania.   
“I wanted to hurt myself! So I did! And it didn’t flare up right away, just when I stopped wishing for the control and started aching for power instead. Then I lit up like an icy light.”   
Caleb frowns as he runs Molly’s words through his head, processing the implications.   
“You would cut yourself as, as, not for fun but-”   
“Yes, that’s the general idea. I feel like you understand that sentiment.” Molly inclines his head at the bandages, “I’ve seen the bite scars. They’re your shape.”   
“I find it a fraction more disturbing that you know the shape of my mouth.” Caleb tries his hand at Molly’s job, keeping the light of the conversation, and it seems to work. Molly chuckles as he leans in to Caleb again.   
“Not nearly as intimately as I’d like, darling.”   
Caleb immediately turns a delightful shade of deep pink and splutters through his next breath, he takes a deep one and silence follows. Molly sits back to give Caleb space, can’t be too heavy handed when he’s so delicate after all.   
Caleb stands.   
“Refill, Mollymauk?” He gestures to Molly’s empty glass, full previously with port.   
“Sorry.” Molly says, and slides his glass over to Caleb.   
Caleb picks it up and heads to the counter, talks briefly with Wessik, and Molly sees him bury his face in his palms for a few seconds in the lonely silence between the glasses being taken and Wessik returning them. He can’t hear a word of the conversation that follows, and it’s hard to read lips on a dragonborn.   
“Somethin’s up, eh?” Wessik grins at Caleb as he hands him the port first, and begins to pour the whiskey out, careful, “I’m around if you need me, what’s a bartender for?”   
Caleb smiles weakly as Wessik slides the second glass to him and he stands,   
“I appreciate it, thank you. Later, perhaps.”   
“Ah, company.” Wessik’s grin doesn’t falter, “I see, I see. G’luck.”   
Caleb nods awkwardly and makes off to Molly, sets the glass down in front of him.   
“Wonderful!” Molly says, elated, he claps once and takes a deep drink, “Thank you.”   
Caleb lifts his glass in salute, mimics Molly, he drains half of his glass in one go and when he drops it again, Molly’s eyebrows are raised.   
“Be careful there.” He says, quietly, “Are you okay? That sort of drinking isn’t like you. It’s more my thing. Or Beau’s.”   
Caleb’s hand rests on the wood of the table beside his glass. Molly very carefully, very deliberately, scoots his hand closer, until he can press the side of his hand against Caleb’s.    
They’re quiet, as Caleb thinks, and Molly doesn’t make a move to press closer. He’s done all that knows he needs to.   
“I am not… a whole person, any more, Mollymauk.” Caleb says, soft and sad and low, “I used to be, back when I believed that I had a future. Now, I skim between the lines of real and unreal, I should not be here at all. I don’t know when I will end, but I am trying to find my way back to the light before I am pulled into the dark. I do not know how to make myself whole again.”   
Molly is quiet for just as long, and before he speaks, he turns his hand over. It’s a gesture, an offer, and Caleb hesitates for only a second before he lays his hand on Molly’s and feels fingers close over the bandages.   
“I know how you feel, I think.” Molly tells him, a fear and distance to his voice that Caleb has only heard once, during the conversation of his history. “I am a new person. I am not whoever came before me, that guy is an asshole, and I’m glad that he’s dead. But he’s gone, and he’s left a hole somewhere in me that I can never seem to fill or fix up. I don’t necessarily feel less  _ whole _ , just hollow. Maybe I was always meant to be em-” he chokes as he realises his words, and tries, again, “I was always meant to be empty.”   
Caleb looks at him, startled, and there’s the glistening threat of tears at the corners of his eyes.   
“You do not seem empty to me.” He says, simple and shocked, and the glistening grows, the first tear rolls.   
“I am.”   
Caleb squishes his hand, briefly, and then lifts. Pulls Molly’s hand up, and kisses gently at his knuckles.    
They don’t talk about that any more, after that, but they don’t take their hands back either. It’s ignored, like an elephant in the room, but they stay with their hands clasped on the table and they talk, amicably about other things. About Beau’s crush on Yasha. About Yasha’s crush on Jester. And about Jester’s crush on Fjord, how he’s trying to hard to be oblivious, too hard, perhaps.    
Then, quite out of the blue, Caleb squeezes Molly’s hand.   
“I like you the way that you are, Mollymauk Tealeaf.” He drags out Molly’s name, an emphasis, “You are able to own the mistakes that you make and forgive yourself them. It is enviable, and I… I think you are… incredible.” He doesn’t look up from the shallow puddle of whiskey in his glass, and Molly squeezes his hand right back.   
“Thank you.” He says, quiet, “And Caleb, I know that you  _ can’t _ forgive yourself the mistakes that you’ve made-”   
“You wouldn’t forgive them either.” Caleb interrupts, sharply, and Molly gives a dark chuckle,   
“Perhaps. But I don’t need to know what you  _ were _ or what you  _ did _ . This, right now, this Caleb.” Molly gestures at Caleb’s whole form, “I like  _ this _ . I like  _ you _ , Caleb. This is  _ my _ Caleb Widogast, with the ink smudged up his cheek from transcribing a spell, the soot and bloodstains on your bandages, the torn lapels and scuffed sleeves and the eyes that look like the sky.”   
“That was… romantic.” Caleb gives something like an awkward laugh, “Far better than your crude flirtations, at least.”   
“Honesty is fucking hard, Caleb, but not when it comes to telling you how I feel, or the way that I see you, and think of you.”   
Caleb’s laugh this time is  _ definitely _ awkward. He’s so unused to this, to dealing with this.   
He switches off, and leaves Molly at the table with little more than a quick forehead kiss, he disappears to his room.

 

And regrets it, later, so he finds himself at Molly’s door in the Pillowtrove, gone two in the morning, he knocks lightly and hopes that Fjord has roomed with the girls the way he threatened to when Molly brought in his companions.   
Molly answers the door, shirtless and ruffled and a little shocked, his long hair is loose, his pants are those he uses to sleep in instead of the ridiculous, over-the-top patterned ones.   
And he’s beautiful.   
“Caleb?” Molly manages before Caleb is pushing into the room up to Mollymauk and kicking the door closed behind him.   
The first kiss is so enthusiastic and forceful that Molly crosses the room backwards and bare skin bumps cold wall, he arches away in shock and gives an  _ oh _ of exclamation.   
“I should have done this earlier.” Caleb plants a hand on Molly’s hip, slips one behind his back to insulate between the wall and his skin. He’s unbound, the bandages abandoned with his coat and books beside his bed, the manacles that chain him to his mistakes, to his past, the things that Molly told him that he doesn’t need to know. He carries the weights still, but he’s not imprisoned by them, not right now, and he takes out that freedom in the form of indulging Molly’s desire to find out, intimately, the shape of his mouth.   
There’s fingers at the hem of Caleb’s shirt and they pause only momentarily to peel him out of it, then Molly is on the offensive, he pushes Caleb back and turns them until the wizard falls backwards onto the bed. He scrambles back and looks up at Molly in the moonlight, each scar emphasised by the pale reflections, and he knows that he’ll be similar. Molly crawls up across his legs and sits at the top of his thighs, he traces across each scar on Caleb’s body. The three crossbow bolts that he blames himself for. The one that went all of the way through his body. The gnarled scar from the imp’s stinger, the first time Molly saw him hit the floor.   
Molly bends, inhuman, to kiss each scar in turn, from the one just above Caleb’s waistband all the way up to the line of an arrow carving through the side of his neck, and he feels Caleb’s fingers thread and grasp, hard, at the hair just behind Molly’s horns.   
He presses his face into the crook of Caleb’s neck and breathes. Just… breathes, for a while. They sit, still, silent, breathing, alive.   
“I love you as you are.” Molly says, breaks the quiet, and Caleb’s fingers run down his back.   
“I love you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway y'all, I recently set up a [patreon page](https://www.patreon.com/zemniannights) for my daily critical role fanart! (Which can be found on my [CR Blog](https://zemniannights.tumblr.com))  
> Yall should check both of those out!


End file.
